USN
Second Graders “Talk with the Animals”
By Scott Merrick
Lower School Technology Coordinator
University School of Nashville
One bright, blue sky December afternoon, second graders at University School of Nashville, Tennessee (USN is a non-sectarian independent school dedicated to reflecting the cultural diversity of the city and encouraging the individual learning potential of its students) filed back into their downtown Nashville building from an active PhysEd period outside. In spite of the unseasonably warm and beautiful weather, they were excited to be coming back inside.
I had been scurrying around, up and down a ladder, up and down stairwells, in and out of my Lower School computer lab, stringing and duct-taping temporary Cat5 cabling. Why? To hook up our new PolyCom videoconferencing equipment in the skylit atrium rimmed by the eight classrooms of the first and second grades. On Friday last, I had successfully tested our new double ISDN telephone lines toward making the upcoming session work. It was to be a 45-minute videoteleconference (VTC) with the Elephant Sanctuary, outside of Hohenwald, Tennessee.
The Elephant Sanctuary, founded and run by Carol Buckley and Scott Blais, comprises 800 plus acres of rolling Middle Tennessee farm and woodland about a hundred miles from Nashville. Founded in 1995, it is dedicated to providing an as-near-as-possible-to-natural environment for Asian elephants, an endangered species. The Sanctuary's videoconferencing program, established through a partnership with Tennessee State University's Project DIANE, is in turn dedicated to educating the public about the plight of Asian elephants, emphasizing what the Sanctuary's founders perceive as the abuse of elephants through their treatment at circuses and zoos.
After the four experienced second grade teachers settled their seventy-two students down in their places on the atrium's carpet, I reminded them that if we were to enjoy this experience and learn from it that they were going to need to show me they were the "best second graders in the country." By the end of the interaction, I had to admit that they must be. USN's student population draws heavily on families from neighboring Vanderbilt University and its associated medical center, but there is about as much academic, cultural and ethnic diversity as any institution, public or independent, can claim. Throughout the presentation, the students were polite, involved, attentive, and inquisitive. My email to Ms. Buckley immediately after the interaction may have said it best: " I'll send along a more detailed thank you soon, but I wanted to tell you how much I appreciate an interaction where the only real problem is that the kids have too many questions” for the time allotted to answer them.
The 45-minute interaction went fast. I am always ready to problem solve whenever there is this much technology in one place at a scheduled time; but, luckily for me, Aaron Kamlay, the Technology Coordinator from the Vanderbilt SCOPE project (with whom I am also affiliated) was on hand for the event. When we lost our local video (all three monitors were showing the remote video and none the local video), we consulted and agreed that we should try another connection between the PolyCom and the projector. It worked! Later, when Ms. Buckley was showing a brief video to the students, the audio was incredibly full of reverb--one teacher noted that it must have been recorded in her bathroom. As soon as we began to hear computer keyboard sounds, clicking and clacking behind the video's audio, we knew that Ms. Buckley had failed to mute her own microphone while showing us the video. The audio track from the film was playing in her own setting, then cycling through our system along with the direct sound track. I leaned into our microphone and said, "Ms. Buckley, you might want to mute your microphone..." and in a moment the sound track normalized. This is simply a learning moment: The next time I hear wild reverb, I'll be much less likely to chalk it up to the production values of the film!
Following a brief but impassioned description of the Sanctuary's history and mission, nicely geared to the grade level of the students, Ms. Buckley talked a bit about the herding habits of Asian elephants. She showed the seven-minute video, chock full of facts, and then spent several minutes asking the children to tell her something that they learned during the film. This is a good tactic for VTC interactions; it takes advantage of the "interactivity" of the medium, and allows the presenter to correct any misconceptions. The result is “dialogue,” as opposed to “lecture.” Finally, asking this kind of comment and response allows validation of the student's perceptions and lets the classroom teachers evaluate students' understanding and involvement. At USN Lower School, this can help generate comments for quarterly personal narrative reports; but at other schools, it could offer a grading opportunity or it could provide a chance for the students to assess themselves (depending on grade level and classroom culture) using a rubric.
After exchanging questions and comments about the film, Ms. Buckley moved to what was perhaps the most engaging of the interaction's activities, sharing images from the remote cameras. There are two remote-controlled cameras mounted on the Sanctuary's barn, and Ms. Buckley is a master at using them. It also helped that our students and their teachers had done their homework: They already knew the names of the elephants at the facility. In fact, they had already "adopted" an elephant per classroom, toward "meeting" it in the VTC. This pre-activity preparation was greatly facilitated by the marvelously complete online resources at the Elephant Sanctuary’s Web site (see link below). The site contains rich photo galleries, video archives, and downloadable curricula for both younger and more advanced classrooms.
Ms. Buckley did not disappoint. Detailed commentary accompanied her masterful manipulation of the cameras. Our students were treated to an intricate commentary on the relationship between Winkie and Sissy, and the elephants even, almost as if on cue, demonstrated the greeting behavior the commentator described. It was incredibly engaging.
Our session drawing to a close, an overall question and answer period was called. (Experimental--"mileage may vary"--View a brief video clip of one question and one answer.) The magic of the medium was that during the Q & A the cameras continued to roam at the direction of our hostess. Some of the elephants actually were cooperative enough to model the behaviors that were being discussed!
Our session ended abruptly, leaving the dozen or so students who had formed their own line at Ms. Darr hoping that a subsequent letter and email follow-up might answer their questions.
More of this kind of VTC, and more interactions using VTC in other configurations—classroom to classroom, expert lecturer to classroom, scientific laboratory to classroom—will be experienced in the future, thanks to the innovative initiative of our USN teachers and to the continuing partnerships between University School of Nashville and Vanderbilt University.
Stay tuned!
Links and References:
University
School Nashville:
The
Elephant Sanctuary:
Science
Community Outreach Partners in Education:
http://medschool.mc.vanderbilt.edu/SCOPE
Vanderbilt
Virtual School
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/virtualschool
